[Long-Awaited] Forbidden Transcript
Ghislaine Maxwell told a top official of the Department of Justice that former President Bill Clinton never visited Jeffrey Epstein's private island estate and had no independent relationship with him outside of the trips the ex-president took on Epstein's plane in the early 2000s, according to a transcript of Maxwell's interview with the DOJ that was released Friday.
"President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein's friend," Maxwell told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. "President Clinton liked me, and we got along terribly well. But I never saw that warmth with Mr. Epstein."
Maxwell, 63, made the comments during a highly-unusual post-conviction interview last month with the second-highest ranking law enforcement official in the country. The transcript of Blanche's nine-hour conversation with Maxwell -- which took place in Tallahassee, Florida -- was made public on Friday by the Department of Justice. A copy was also provided to a U.S. House committee in response to a subpoena for investigative files related to Epstein.
“I do not believe he [Epstein] died by suicide, no,” Maxwell said. Her answer on Epstein’s suicide is likely to spur further questions While the interview didn’t shed much light, in one way it’s likely to fuel more questions.
Maxwell was asked to speculate on who might have killed Epstein, and she said she didn’t know.
Maxwell did break from many of the theories about Epstein’s death, in that she said she didn’t believe he was killed because he was blackmailing people. Instead, she suggested it could have been an attack unrelated to that.
“In prison, where I am, they will kill you or they will pay – somebody can pay a prisoner to kill you for $25 worth of commissary,” Maxwell said. “That’s about the going rate for a hit with a lock today.”
The former girlfriend and longtime companion of Epstein -- who was granted limited immunity for her discussions with Blanche -- was convicted in 2021 of sex-trafficking and other offenses connected to her facilitation and participation in Epstein's sexual exploitation of minor girls.
Her attorneys insisted on her innocence throughout the trial and contended the government was prosecuting her as a "substitute" for Epstein, after the accused child sex-trafficker died in federal custody in 2019.
At her sentencing hearing in 2022, a federal prosecutor said that Maxwell had shown "absolutely no remorse" and had "made misrepresentations when it suits her." A federal judge imposed a 20 year prison sentence.
Blanche -- the top deputy to U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi -- indicated ahead of the Maxwell meeting that the goal was to determine if she had "information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims," according to a July 22 statement posted to social media by the DOJ.
Maxwell told Blanche that she had never witnessed any wrongdoing by Clinton -- or any other of the high-profile men, including Donald Trump, who have been previously connected to Epstein. She described the two-term former Democratic president as a "truly extraordinary" man.
A close friend introduced her to Clinton, she told Blanche, and she claimed she eventually became friendly enough with the former president to be invited to visit his home in the suburbs of New York City, where she said she also saw then-Senator Hillary Clinton.
"I went to the house in Chappaqua a few times ... as a friend," she said, without providing a time frame for the visits.
"I don't remember any reason either," she said, suggesting she may have just been driving past the area and -- if they were home -- she'd stop. "I know it sounds a little flippant," she added.
In 2010, Maxwell said she attended the wedding of the Clintons' daughter, Chelsea, with her then-boyfriend, Gateway computers co-founder Ted Waitt, who she said was "very close" with Bill Clinton. Maxwell said she initially met Waitt years earlier at a Clinton event in Hong Kong. She said Clinton flew there on Epstein's plane.
Clinton's history of traveling with Epstein has long fueled speculation and innuendo about the nature of their relationship. Flight logs from Epstein's private jets made public during civil litigation against Epstein showed that Clinton and his entourage had flown extensively in 2002 and 2003 on the financier's Boeing 727 to international locations, including Rwanda, Russia and China. Maxwell was listed as a passenger on each of those trips, identified in the logs by the initials, "GM."
Maxwell told Blanche that she was the one who suggested to Epstein that he make his plane available to Clinton for the trips.
"[T]hey met because of me, and the plane was because of me," she said.
"I saw them talk, I saw them sit down and have chats," Maxwell said. "I didn't see President Clinton being interested in Epstein. He was just a rich guy with the plane."
Clinton's last known trip on Epstein's plane was in November 2003. The first reports that Epstein was under investigation in Florida for alleged sexual exploitation of minors did not surface until 2005. Clinton has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection to his time spent with Epstein.
But as far back as 2015, Trump has insinuated that Clinton's travels with Epstein might involve some compromising behavior. At a conservative political conference that year -- before he formally announced his first bid for president -- Trump told the audience that Clinton is a "nice guy," but has "a lot of problems coming up, in my opinion, with the famous island" off of St. Thomas, where Epstein entertained his wealthy and famous friends.
President Trump has since often repeated the spurious claim that Clinton went to Epstein's island more than twenty times, while noting that he had never been there himself.
"I never went to the island," Trump told reporters at the White House last month, as his administration continued to deal with the fallout of its decision not to release Epstein investigative files to the public.
"I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down, I didn't want to go to his island," Trump said.
Clinton and his aides had done little to address questions about the ex-president's relationship with Epstein until after his arrest in July 2019. A spokesperson issued a statement two days later saying that Clinton "knows nothing" of Epstein's crimes and had never visited Little St. James, the island Epstein purchased for about $8 million in 1998. The statement said Clinton hadn't spoken to Epstein in "well over a decade" and that all the trips on Epstein's plane "included stops in connection with the work of The Clinton Foundation."
Maxwell told Blanche she was certain the former president had never been to the island.
"He never, absolutely never went. And I can be sure of that because there's no way he would have gone. I don't believe there's any way that he would've gone to the island had I not been there. Because I don't believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein," Maxwell told Blanche.
All the trips with Clinton on Epstein's plane that she could recall, Maxwell said, had a "humanitarian side."
"And I thought it was an honor and a privilege to be part of something so amazing and to have an opportunity to spend time with a man that I found truly extraordinary," she said.
"And please, I don't mean it in any other way other than as a fantastic ex-president," she added.
After Clinton left the White House in 2001, Maxwell said she began spending time with the former president as he was forging his post-presidential path through the establishment of the Clinton Foundation and, later, the Clinton Global Initiative [CGI].
"I had no purpose, really, other than I had -- obviously offered something. I don't know, ideas." she said.
She claimed to be "very central" to supporting the ramp-up of CGI [Clinton Global Initiative], according to the transcript. She said she traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and helped connect an organizer of that conference with Clinton's team.
"I thought that the former president should have his own Davos," she told Blanche. "It turned out that they had been thinking about it anyway."
Maxwell said she helped to bring key personnel to the effort to form CGI, but said she didn't want to "elevate [herself] in any form of importance here."
"I just want to say that it wasn't my idea for his CGI," she said. "They had that idea before."
CGI was officially launched in 2005.
The first public allegations claiming Maxwell had a central role in Epstein's child sex-trafficking scheme were contained in a lawsuit filed in Florida in 2009.
Epstein, Maxwell said, was supportive of her efforts to assist Clinton.
"But then I think he may have tried to use that to insert himself in some way that would not have surprised me at all," she said. "[A]nd he wouldn't always agree with what I wanted to do. And I was like, 'it's not your idea. I don't really care what you think.' But that didn't go over so well."
Both Epstein and Maxwell sought to highlight their claimed contributions to the Clinton initiatives when they were seeking leniency in the federal justice system.
When Epstein first faced federal prosecution in 2007, one of his lawyers wrote to prosecutors to tout Epstein's pedigree as "part of the original group that conceived of the Clinton Global Initiative," according to a letter attached to a court filing in Florida federal court.
Prior to her sentencing, Maxwell's attorneys asked the court to impose a below-guidelines punishment, contending that Maxwell "has endeavored to contribute to society," including her work "helping launch the Clinton Global Initiative," according to court records of her criminal case.
The Maxwell interview was one of two steps the White House took to try and quell outrage over its handling of the Epstein files, which has rocked the administration for weeks and caused even many supporters of President Donald Trump to balk.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and other officials had built up anticipation for the Epstein documents before pulling back on promises to release them. Trump has also made a series of false and misleading claims that have caused Epstein’s victims to suggest a cover-up.
The administration’s other big move – asking to unseal grand jury testimony – hasn’t amounted to much. In fact, two judges have suggested it was a “diversion” intended to look transparent without actually being so.
The Maxwell interview conducted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, likewise, doesn’t add much to the public knowledge of Epstein. But there are some key points worth running through – particularly in the broader context of the administration’s botched handling of the matter.
The Maxwell interview is the administration’s first significant release of information since its effort to close the matter blew up in its face last month.
(Also on Friday, it sent Epstein documents to a House committee that had demanded them, but those aren’t public yet.)
But it was always a weird choice, given Maxwell is a convicted sex offender and her appeals are ongoing. The Justice Department in Trump’s first term also labeled her a brazen liar. What could she possibly add of value?
Not a whole lot, it seems.
The big headlines are that Maxwell doesn’t implicate anybody – including Trump – in any wrongdoing and says Epstein didn’t have a client list. But those statements might carry more weight if Maxwell came clean about her and Epstein’s own misdeeds.
She clearly didn’t do that. In fact, she repeatedly cast doubt on them, too.
She denied that Epstein paid her millions of dollars to recruit young women for him. She denied witnessing any nonconsensual sex acts. And she denied seeing anything “inappropriate” from “any man” – seemingly including Epstein.
“I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age,” Maxwell said. “I never saw inappropriate habits.”
Some other Maxwell responses also call her credibility into question.
In another instance, Maxwell claimed Epstein didn’t have “inappropriate” cameras inside his New York, Caribbean, New Mexico and Paris residences. Cameras in his Palm Beach, Florida, house were used because money was being stolen. But Epstein’s seven-story townhouse in Manhattan was outfitted with cameras, the New York Times reported earlier this month. Several of Epstein’s victims have cited a network of hidden cameras.
In another instance, Maxwell indicated she didn’t recall recruiting a masseuse from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – seemingly denying Virginia Giuffre’s claim that that’s where Maxwell recruited her.
“I’ve never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago for that, as far as I remember,” she said.
But the next day, Maxwell made a point to water down that denial.
“I don’t remember anybody that I would have [recruited],” Maxwell said. “But it’s not impossible that I might have asked someone from there.”
If Maxwell wasn’t about to come clean about her own crimes, should we really have expected her to shed light on anything else?
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